White Flight in the Context of Education: Evidence from South Carolina

Abstract

In the context of education, white flight refers to decreasing white enrollment in poor-performing, inner-city public schools. This article investigates white flight and the concomitant movement to better performing public schools and racially homogenous private schools using elementary school enrollment data from South Carolina, particularly the Columbia Metropolitan Area. The findings indicate a consistent loss of white enrollments from poorperforming, inner-city schools. The private school enrollment rates of whites are also sensitive to both the academic quality and the proportion of minorities in neighborhood schools as well as the racial composition of the neighborhoods.

Instrumental Music Education in Rural North Carolina: A Descriptive Study

“…Many Caucasian families opposed the desegregation busing programs, citing unsafe schools and increased travel time to and from schools as barriers to their children's education and participation in extra curricular activities (DeWitt, 2016). This led to the phenomenon known as White flight, where White families chose to move to the suburbs in order for their children to attend suburban schools, or put their children into private schools (Zhang, 2009). This White flight phenomenon effectively re-segregated urban schools and left urban students "unable to access social and economic resources that Whites and middle-class families traditionally bring to urban school settings" (Lewis & Moore, 2008, p. 4).…”

“…More recently, some families have used school choice initiatives to attend private schools or charter schools with a specialized curriculum rather than go to the assigned neighborhood school. Theoretically, school choice allows better access to quality schools for students of color or low socioeconomic status; however, it has further segregated urban schools as families of a racial minority or of a low-income household are less likely to take advantage of school choice (Zhang, 2009). Families of low socioeconomic status or families of color in urban areas have often not had the financial means to relocate, so they have continually and generationally been limited to these urban areas with low property values and poorly funded schools (Ostrander, 2015).…”

“…Although enrollment of students of color increased in urban, suburban, and rural schools in South Carolina between 1987-2003, (Figure 2), white student enrollment increased in rural and suburban areas while declining significantly in urban areas of South Carolina during the same time (see Figure 3) (Zhang, 2009). Many people have associated the phrase "urban school" with "poor" or "at-risk,"…”

Redrawing Attendance Boundaries to Promote Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Elementary Schools

“…Still, changing attendance boundaries within districts continues to be a highly contentious topic, especially when issues of diversity are also at stake (McMillan, 2018). Parents may fear that rezoning students will increase travel times through longer "busing" (Frankenberg & Jacobsen, 2011), reduce quality of education (Zhang, 2008)-which they often define vis-á-vis test scores (Abdulkadiroglu et al, 2019) and class sizes (Gilraine et al, 2018)-produce unsafe school environments (The Baltimore Sun Staff, 2019), drop property values (Black, 1999;Bridges, 2016;Kane et al, 2005), fragment communities (Bridges, 2016;Staff, 2019), and require a number of other sacrifices.…”

Editor's Notebook

“…Health care is unevenly distributed across the population, impacting quality of life (Grady 2010). Educational opportunities at the primary and secondary level continue to be divided among wealthy and poor districts, usually based on property taxes (Johnson 2006;Zhang 2009). President Trump was elected in part because so many people across the country felt that they had been left behind; although some regions and income groups prosper, many more face uncertainty, as evidenced in the graphs depicting the shrinking middle class in this article from The Guardian (Galka 2017).…”